Novelists Quotes
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Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.
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Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists.
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What's important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that's progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists.
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A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
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No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.
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How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?
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Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
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I grew up as a reader as well as a movie-lover, so many of the novelists I admired - and so many of the great filmmakers I loved - were self-taught.
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Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio.
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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
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They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
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Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.
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The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.
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Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.
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As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake - all the cake - and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
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And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist--
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Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.
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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.
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The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.
